LPWAN developer Ingenu coming to Australia

With LoRaWan and Sigfox networks already being rolled out in Australia, a third player, Ingenu is planning to enter the market.

The US based company (formerly On-Ramp Wireless) announced in late February that it was accelerating its rollout of dedicated IoT networks around the globe “based on burgeoning demand.”

The company said it would be “Working with strategic licensing partners [to provide] connectivity specifically and exclusively for machine traffic in 25 countries on six continents around the world, accounting for more than 50 percent of the world’s population.”

It listed the “countries benefitting from these licensing agreements” as being Australia, China, New Zealand, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Africa, Thailand, United Arab Emirates. The company claims to already have 38 private networks built on its technology in more than 20 countries, including: Japan, Chile, United States, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Canada

CEO John Horn, said: “Our five-year plan has turned into a five-month strategy based on demand from the volume of global partners approaching us.”

Ingenu uses a patented proprietary Random Phase Multiple Access technology that it says it will license to partners around the globe, granting them exclusive rights to build nationwide public networks specifically for IoT traffic in their respective countries. “These licensing agreements will enable key strategic partners to support connectivity initiatives for smart cities, asset tracking, transportation, energy, agriculture and a host of other IoT applications,” the company said.

Somehow it has managed to trademark the term Machine Network, for an RPMA network, which comprises “access points, receivers or modules, and the signal itself.”

In an interview with Mobile World Live, Horn claimed that the company’s proprietary technology could “fight off the might of future 3GPP-backed standards, pointing to its backing by a number of heavyweight industry figures as evidence it has the edge over rivals in the market,” Mobile World Live said, adding that Ingenu was “touting its RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) technology as superior to other proprietary LPWA offerings from the likes of Sigfox and the LoRa Alliance.”

Horn also said: “Our board members are all investors in the company. Our board are the people that created this industry… Andrew Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm, which created the chip that started everything, [former Verizon execs] Dick Lynch and Ivan Seidenberg, the two first people to get behind LTE and create it as a world standard. They are saying LTE is a standard for people, but RPMA is the standard for machines.”

On-Ramp Wireless was granted US Patent No 777364 B2 for the technology in 2010. According to the Wikipedia entry on RPMA RPMA access points can cover 300 square miles (777sqkm) and it would take 30 cellular towers to cover the same area. Ingenu, reportedly has access points covering 450 square miles each. The technology operates in the 2.4GHz unlicensed (class licensed in Australia) band.

“RPMA’s uplink is 624kbps and downlink is 56kbps, which is about 10 times the speed of dialup internet. When moving RPMA’s speeds drop, as is typical for wireless connections, to 2kbps] These speeds are adequate for the majority of IoT applications being faster than 2G and orders of magnitude faster than Sigfox,” Wikipedia said.